Saturday afternoon, Benji and I went out to have some Mommy-Benji time. I had an errand in downtown Kirkland, but after that I suggested we go to Marina Park, or one of the other nearby Kirkland parks. Benji adamantly insisted he wanted to go for a hike. I tried to negotiate out of it by offering to do a hike on Sunday afternoon if we just went to one of the smaller regular parks within walking distance. No dice. He wanted to hike.

After giving it some good thought, I decided that if my kid wanted to go for a hike, I should encourage that, even if I’d already parked downtown. I also remembered that Bridle Trails wasn’t that far from downtown. Okay; if he wants a hike, we’ll do a hike. And the weather was lovely: sunny and above 50.

We weren’t in the right shoes — I had on old running shoes, and Benji doesn’t even have anything appropriate for hiking in that level of mud and muck — but oh well. Then, when we got there, there was a big Seattle Running Club event where people were running a 50k in teams or solo (!), so there were also runners and their cars all over the place.

Even so, we walked for about 1.25 miles and had a nice time before the sun set.

The next afternoon, all three of us went back to Bridle Trails and ended up walking a full 3 miles, pretty decent for a 5-year-old. We all agreed to have a goal of doing a family hike every weekend, rain or shine. Benji said he wants to walk 6 miles (a 10k), so we said okay, we’ll work up to that. We shall see if we end up actually pursuing that goal, but in the meantime we have a plan of hiking the 3.5-mile loop in Bridle Trails next weekend.

I saw this sign and the persnickety writer in me just couldn’t resist thinking, “What’s an off-leash bicycle??”